The Paris Housekeeper, page 1
Praise for the novels of Renee Ryan
“The Paris Housekeeper is the beautifully written story of three very different women caught up in the Nazi occupation of Paris in World War II. The characters of Rachel, Camille and Vivian jump off the page. I enjoyed every page. Highly recommend!
—Karen Robards, New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan of Paris
“In this Upstairs, Downstairs look at the Ritz during World War II, three lives entwine: a wealthy American widow and two maids at the Ritz, one of whom is in deep peril by virtue of being Jewish. What will they risk? Perfect for fans of Pam Jenoff and Kristin Hannah looking for more stories of heroism in World War II France!”
—Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author of Two Wars and a Wedding, on The Paris Housekeeper
“The Secret Society of Salzburg is a heart-wrenching yet uplifting tale about the importance of art and beauty in the darkest of times. Renee Ryan weaves a masterful story of the life-or-death struggle Jewish refugees faced anchored by the unbreakable friendship of two extraordinary women. A must-read.”
—Julia Kelly, internationally bestselling author of The Last Dance of the Debutante
“The Secret Society of Salzburg is a gripping, emotional story of courage and strength, filled with extraordinary characters and tender relationships. Renee Ryan reminds us that the universal languages of art, music and friendship bring light and hope amid even the most challenging of times. I loved every word.”
—RaeAnne Thayne, New York Times bestselling author of The Beach Reads Bookshop
“The Secret Society of Salzburg is a powerful journey of bravery, secrets, and subterfuge. In a world where beauty and art are set amid the ugliness of hate and oppression, two friends emerge to save those most at risk despite being under constant threat of danger. Renee Ryan is a brilliant storyteller and this book is definitely one you don’t want to miss!”
—Madeline Martin, New York Times bestselling author of The Librarian Spy
“The Widows of Champagne is a heady concoction of everything I love about historical fiction—history, drama, and passion as effervescent as the resilient LeBlanc women and the champagne that bears their name. I highly recommend!”
—Karen White, New York Times bestselling author
of The Last Night in London
The Paris Housekeeper
Renee Ryan
To Hillary, my daughter, my heart, my inspiration. You make being a wife, a mother, a nurse and a friend look easy. To say I’m proud wouldn’t be enough. I’m truly humbled.
Contents
The Invasion
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The Occupation
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
The German
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
The Roundups
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Paris Housekeeper
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Betrayal
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Excerpt from The Secret Society of Salzburg by Renee Ryan
The Invasion
Chapter One
Rachel
14 June 1940.
Paris, France.
Paris was out of time.
The French government knew it. The people knew it.
Now, nineteen-year-old Rachel Berman knew it, too. And as she sat with her family in her parents’ living room, listening to the minute-by-minute updates on the wireless, she understood something else. Something truly horrifying.
Victory belonged to the enemy.
The German war machine stood poised just outside Paris, neither invading nor retreating. The troops—all three hundred thousand of them—had arrived yesterday. They’d had twenty-four hours to make their move, and still, even with dawn breaking over the horizon, and not a hint of inclement weather, they didn’t invade the French capital.
The cause for this perplexing hesitation was unknown. There’d been speculation, of course, but nothing concrete that would explain it. Was this a military tactic to frighten Parisians? If so, it was working. One thing was certain, at least to Rachel, and anyone paying attention. Paris would fall into German hands by nightfall, possibly sooner, maybe even within the hour.
What then? What would it mean to be a Jew living in German-occupied France?
Would the Nazis bring their anti-Semitic racial policies with them? Would they mark off whole sections of Paris, as they’d done in the Polish city of Lodz, and then force all Jews to live within the small, designated area?
They could do it. Probably would do it.
Trapped behind barbed wire, held there by ignorance and hate. The thought made Rachel feel hot, sweaty, and mildly nauseated. She had to close her eyes to let the sensation pass.
A feeble sound filled the room. Her mother weeping into a handkerchief.
Rachel whipped open her eyes and sent her gaze around the apartment, taking in her family with a single swoop. Her mother, all soft curves, always ready with a smile or kind word. Her older sister, Basia, so pretty, beautiful, actually, with her coal-black hair and startling green eyes. No one would guess the twenty-four-year-old was a seamstress working in a fashion designer’s atelier rather than one of the models hired to show off the exquisite clothing.
Would Basia have a job after today? Would any of them? So much uncertainty. Even after completing two accounting courses, and being very good with numbers, Rachel couldn’t find the proper formula to explain the rapid defeat of what had been deemed the world’s mightiest army. Strong only on paper.
On the other side of the room, Rachel’s father sat upright and still, remarkably stoic in his silence, his eyes barely blinking beneath the bushy flop of salt-and-pepper hair. Rachel adored Ezra Berman. She respected him even more. He was the quintessential hardworking Polish immigrant, a tailor by trade, who’d opened his own shop in their middle-class neighborhood ten years ago, after much toil and sacrifice in his adopted city.
At fifty-five, he was too old to be conscripted into the army.
At barely seventeen, Rachel’s brother, Srulka, was too young.
“Our soldiers have fought valiantly. French casualties are high. Their deaths, I fear, have been in vain.” The disembodied voice crackled from the wireless, proud and strong, but also angry. Rachel understood the anger, felt it herself.
Her mother still wept, softly now, a sort of whimpering, and her father remained calmly resigned. There was no wailing or gnashing of teeth on his part, and suddenly Rachel could stand his silence no longer.
“Papa,” she blurted, rushing to kneel before him, her hands reaching for his, holding fast when his fingers closed over hers. “It’s not too late to flee the city.”
It would have to be soon. They had hours, possibly less.
“We would need to leave immediately,” she urged. “If we are to beat the Germans.”
A flinch crossed his face, gone as quickly as it came. It was the first real emotion her father had shown all morning and gave Rachel the courage to press on. “The Germans—the Nazis—will march into Paris at any moment. There will be no escaping the city then. We must go now. Right. Now.”
A deep, staggering silence met her impassioned plea. Not even her siblings joined in the argument, though she knew they shared her concerns. “Surely you agree.” She squeezed her father’s hands. “Surely you understand the danger we’re in.”
Someone cleared his throat. Her brother. Rachel ignored him. “Papa, please. Let us leave Paris.”
With slow, careful movements, he released her hands and spoke in his deep, gravelly voice heavily accented with his native Yiddish. “We stay.”
Rachel blinked, stunned. She opened her mouth to argue.
He stopped her with a fast shake of his head. “We have discussed this, Rachel. We will not abandon this apartment, our home. I will not forsake my business and give my customers cause to find another tailor.”
“What customers do you have left? Most have enlisted in the army or fled the city.”
“They
“Papa,” Rachel whispered. “The battle is over. Paris will fall. This is not something that might happen. It will happen. Then we will be at the mercy of Nazis.”
“I have lived through worse.” He was referring to his previous life in Poland after the Great War, the days of desperate want and need, the poverty that had led him to immigrate with his wife and daughter to a new city, in a foreign country. Paris had been good to their family.
That Paris no longer existed.
“This war will not be the same as the last,” Rachel said. What was happing in Poland was proof of that. “This enemy, these new Germans, they are harder, angrier, and more ruthless. Hate lives in their heart. Hate for people like us.”
Her father’s chin went hard. “We are French citizens.”
“No, Papa. We are Jews.” The words came from somewhere deep inside, from a well of something she hadn’t acknowledged, not fully. Fear, anger, outrage that her father clung to his false sense of security. That somehow German occupation in France would be different than what the people of Poland suffered.
“Nebbish! Rachel, hertzeleh, you worry too much. Our neighbors, they are good people. They will protect us from the Nazis. We are safe in Paris. Now. Enough of this arguing.” He rose abruptly, sending Rachel scrambling to her feet as well. “The Germans have not entered the city, and so we will go on as we always have. Me, to my shop. Srulka to school. You and your sister to your jobs.”
Basia left the apartment first, a soft sigh and brief wave her only farewell. Her father and brother were the next to go, leaving Rachel alone with her mother. The older woman took her in her arms, and Rachel had to fight not to cling. “Do not fret, schatzeleh. Your father is never wrong about these things.”
For several moments, Rachel couldn’t respond. Her eyes were hot, and she wanted to cry, but the tears were stuck in her throat, hot and painful. “I hope you’re right, Mama.”
“We must trust your father. Now.” She patted Rachel’s cheek and gave her the same goodbye she’d given the others. “Sei gesund.” Be well.
She nodded. There were no more arguments to make, no more words to say, and yet Rachel didn’t want to leave the safety of her mother’s arms, or the familiar aroma of oil and goose fat that permeated the air in their small apartment. They were the soothing scents of her childhood, so comforting and normal, a reminder of her Polish heritage.
Despite what her father wanted to believe, the Bermans were not French, not even Rachel and her younger brother, who were both born in Paris. No, they were still foreigners. Still Jews. Irreligious, and fully assimilated, but of a different race. Separate and apart, foreigners.
No, Rachel thought, she didn’t want to leave the safety of her home, but she did.
Out in the hallway, she could hear a dog barking from somewhere in the building, and—she thought maybe—a baby crying. Another thought came then, a foreboding that the poor sobbing child would not see his next birthday. It was a dark, ugly thought, and one Rachel couldn’t suppress now that it had come into her mind. She blamed her black mood on her disagreement with her father.
Pressing her lips together, she exited the building. The hot, humid air greeted her with suffocating precision. It was as if she could feel evil drifting on the light breeze. As she made her way down the wide boulevards and long avenues, the city felt too large, empty. Void of nearly two million Parisians who’d already escaped, the streets were a concrete desert, every sound magnified exponentially, as if coming from inside a cave. A dungeon of echoes.
Rachel hurried her steps.
A burst of wind whipped a slip of her black hair free from her blue chenille beret. The loose curl slapped against her cheek. Rachel tucked the wayward strand beneath the cap and picked up her pace. She took the final corner onto Rue Cambon, a sigh of relief on her lips. She’d made the entire journey without crossing paths with a single German soldier.
Paris was still a French city.
For how long?
She looked to her left, to her right. Even here, there was little activity. Rachel took another moment to study the Hôtel Ritz, where she worked as a chambermaid. The exterior looked like a palace from another century. The interior was just as grand. The hotel was actually a combination of two buildings with two separate entryways, four stories each and a row of dormer windows on the top floor. Most guests preferred the main entrance on the Place Vendôme, but employees were required to enter via the service entrance on Rue Cambon.
Rachel made her way to the women’s locker room and began unpacking her uniform from her satchel, then worked on steaming out the creases. Employees were never allowed to wear their uniforms outside the hotel. Madame Ritz was adamant on this point. She wanted to create an image that her staff existed only inside the walls of the Ritz. Like a fairy tale, they were to appear fully formed, conjured as if from dreams, always available to provide the hotel’s signature luxury service.
Once she donned her uniform and pinned on her lace cap, Rachel left the locker room. A wave of desperation rolled through her, and she had to pause a moment. There was that sense of helplessness again, creeping down the back of her neck. She leaned against the wall and tried to breathe through the anxiety fluttering in her chest. She heard voices coming from the laundry room, but only as if from a great distance. Tears threatened. She fought them back. To cry, here and now, was an indulgence she could ill afford.
She must be strong.
Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, and quietly admitted she feared what the Germans would do once they entered Paris. To her, her family, the other Jews who’d remained in the city.
We are French citizens.
Her father had spoken with great calm and authority. Clearly, on the surface at least, he wasn’t worried about the German invasion. Her mother seemed to agree. Rachel would try to do the same. Jaw set, she forced herself to shrug off her own fears and take on the mantle of her father’s confidence in their French neighbors. She opened her eyes, pushed from the wall, and entered the laundry room. Her supervisor, Madame Bergeron, spotted her at once and pointed a bony finger in her direction.
“You, there. The Jewish girl. Come with me.”
The Jewish girl.
Already, it started. The labeling, the setting apart, the being treated as different and thus somehow less. These were the thoughts that plagued Rachel as she followed her supervisor out into the corridor and down the two flights of stairs that ended in the dimly lit hotel basements.
Never talkative, the lead housekeeper was resolutely solemn this morning. Rachel was glad for her silence. Something felt wrong about this errand.
You, there. The Jewish girl.
She desperately wanted to turn and run. Where would she go? Home. Her mother would only send her back. With her father losing clients daily, the family needed her extra wages to survive. She sighed, focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Stony and pinched-faced, Madame Bergeron carried the scent of stale cigarettes on her clothing. Rachel wondered if she were the smoker, or if she’d been in one of the guest rooms.
At last, they reached the bottom of the stairs, turned to the right, and continued, with Madame Bergeron taking the lead. The lack of light was a physical presence, as if the dark were closing in on Rachel. Suffocating her, shadows melting into one another to form a forest of cold emptiness.
Eventually, the head housekeeper stopped in front of a closed door, and Rachel was able to take a decent pull of air. Of course, she thought. Of course. They stood before the closet where the hotel kept a back stock of bed linens and towels.
Madame Bergeron retrieved the metal ring of keys at her waist and clattered one into the lock. She reached to the single light bulb hanging from a fine, frail wire, now swaying from the fresh wave of air from the open door. It was too dark inside. There were no windows, the only light supplied by the forty-watt bulb. The walls were lined with shelves from floor to ceiling, each overflowing with bedsheets, pillowcases, and linens of every shape and size.
“Grab as many towels as you can carry,” Madame Bergeron told her. “I will get the rest.”
Rachel reached out, then paused when a series of shouts rang out from somewhere overhead. Voices twisted into a garbled cacophony of rapid-fire words and sentences. One black, ugly word leaped out of the chaos. “Nazis.”
